6 min read · 21 April 2009
2 min read · 20 April 2009
Two-year old Smash Technologies, whose SMS messaging platform is designed to provide businesses with smarter ways to reach their customers, has raised raised a $1.35 million seed round led by tech entrepreneur, investor and Dallas Mavericks’ owner/superfan Mark Cuban. The company, which has an office is San Francisco, is headquartered in Pittsburgh, Cuban’s home town. Among those to try out its services are McDonalds, the Harlem Globetrotters, and the Miller Brewing Company.
1 min read · 20 April 2009
Seattle-based Madrona Venture Group has just brought in 28-year-old developer Damon Cortesi as an entrepreneur-in-residence. Cortesi is a risk-management expert and, more recently, a Twitter junkie who has produced a number of Twitter-based applications. These include TweetStats, which allows users to track the rates of their monthly, daily and even hourly "tweets," and TweepSearch, a service that helps Twitterers find specific friends.
1 min read · 17 April 2009
Vator.tv just posted an interview with serial entrepreneur Mark Pincus, who has raised $39 million from Kleiner Perkins and others for his game company Zynga, as well as founded the social network Tribe Networks and Supportsoft, a company that went public in 2000. Pincus is a smart guy; he has some interesting advice to entrepreneurs who are trying to launch their businesses in these gloomy economic times. Watch the video after the jump.
1 min read · 17 April 2009
A new seed-stage fund has quietly emerged in Silicon Valley called Quest Venture Partners. Based in Menlo Park and managed by brothers Andrew and Marcus Ogawa, the firm invests between $100,000 and $1.5 million in nascent digital media companies. Here's what's unusual: the brothers, who were born and raised in Japan, hadn't previously worked for a venture firm. They weren’t seasoned entrepreneurs before opening Quest. Thirty-seven-year-old Andrew spent more than a decade as a manager at Daimler AG, while Marcus, 30, had developed Web apps for various companies and was co-founder of a small, now-defunct startup called Enterprise Great Solutions. Their backgrounds don’t necessarily stand out in competitive, clubby Silicon Valley. Yet some helpful introductions, an impressive array of co-investors, and deep family pockets have won them a seat at the table, and it’s a game they now intend to play for life, if they can play their cards right.
4 min read · 16 April 2009
Aydin Senkut decided to quit Google in 2005, after six years as a senor manager responsible for Asia Pacific strategic partner development and account management. He wasn’t fed up. He simply didn’t need to work at Google any more. Like many of his peers at the time, the now-39-year-old became supremely wealthy almost overnight when the company went public in 2004. Still, Senkut didn't hit the beach (for long). Instead, he almost immediately began working again, this time on his own investment firm called Felicis Ventures. He designed his own logo and website, set up his own phones, had business cards made and set up informational interviews for himself all over the Valley, including with Sequoia’s Mike Moritz. At the heart of his questions was this: Is it possible to break into VC without first working for an established venture fund?
5 min read · 14 April 2009
I used to use Web discovery tool Stumbleupon before it sold to eBay a couple of years ago for $75 million. After that I sort of stopped, assuming it would reemerge, looking or operating differently, once eBay did whatever it was planning to do with it. Apparently, I wasn't alone in dropping my usage. As TechCrunch points out today, after the acquisition, StumbleUpon's traffic stagnated at roughly 1.5 million unique visitors per month. And little wonder. After eBay scooped it up, the company operated in a state of "suspended animation," said investor David Hornik of August Capital to VentureWire this morning. I have a feeling that's going to change, quickly. Yesterday, it was announced that StumbleUpon has been bought back for an undisclosed amount by its original founders, Garrett Camp and Geoff Smith, as well as original investor Ram Shriram of Sherpalo Ventures and new investors Accel Partners and August Capital. And while many folks are scratching their heads over why they bothered -- StumbleUpon's original backers made a killing, having invested just $1.5 million in the company before eBay bought it -- the team is already making moves to reacquaint people with the service.
2 min read · 14 April 2009
You probably haven’t heard of Palo Alto-based K9 Ventures, but it may sound familiar all the same. It’s been founded by Manu Kumar, a serial entrepreneur who’s done some angel investing and who, like a growing number of founders, isn’t letting his lack of traditional venture capital experience stop him from diving headlong into the industry with a new shop of his own. I spoke today with the industry’s newest entrepreneur-turned-investor to find out more about what he's planning, and why he thinks he can pull it off. Our Q&A is after the jump:
5 min read · 14 April 2009
Another young startup is throwing in the towel. Kwiry, a San Francisco-based company that transformed text messages into email reminders, has sent its users notice that "with heavy hearts," due to "economic realities," it's shutting down on April 23, and that "as of today," the service is no longer accepting new sign-ins." Kwiry, backed with $1 million from Hummer Winblad, had let users SMS reminders to themselves - or, more literally, to K-W-I-R-Y (59479) -- after which the service would email them research results related to the message.
1 min read · 13 April 2009
